65,000 backers and only 133 playing the game right now. Those figures do not compute. Something is off.
Actually, that ratio is probably standard for "early access" games, particularly of the MMO kind. A great many people buy , try and shelve it for "later" once they find that the "early" state of the game is not really compelling.
And in the case of MMO's, there's often a wipe or two during development, which also discourages frequent or prolonged play.
133 players on steam playing. Last I checked I still don't have to play the game through steam. So saying just 133 people are playing can be very misleading.
65,000 backers and only 133 playing the game right now. Those figures do not compute. Something is off.
Actually, that ratio is probably standard for "early access" games, particularly of the MMO kind. A great many people buy , try and shelve it for "later" once they find that the "early" state of the game is not really compelling.
And in the case of MMO's, there's often a wipe or two during development, which also discourages frequent or prolonged play.
133 players on steam playing. Last I checked I still don't have to play the game through steam. So saying just 133 people are playing can be very misleading.
blorpykins said: How can Portalarium not know how they're going to make money?
Because contrary to ridiculous believes of the posters here, monetization model isn't an initial and driving force behind game design and is usually decided in quite late development...
If businesses really are starting up MMO development without thinking about how they're going to make money from it, it's no wonder why so many MMOs are failing these days (it's not as much an issue with non MMOs, of course, considering that their revenue model basically just boils down to "Make people buy this game.")
That said, considering how deeply entwined the cash shop is with a lot of F2P MMOs, I am quite positive that monetization has entered into the design phase rather early in most F2P MMOs' life. Not so much with B2P and Sub MMOs of course (of which the long term ramifications of B2P leads to some rather hilarious monetization issues down the line. Guild Wars 2 really seems directionless sometimes...)
Given the haphazard nature of it and Richard Garriot's statements that are hilariously out of touch with reality when it comes to the game's revenue hurdles in front of it, Shroud of the Avatar didn't consider monetization until late into development it seems, however. But of course, they didn't consider lots of things (or at least consider lots of things correctly).
HAHAHA omg they actually think that game is worth more then a 15$ a month sub that's priceless honestly from what I've seen the game barely rates a 5$ a month sub and an initial price tag.
65,000 backers and only 133 playing the game right now. Those figures do not compute. Something is off.
I'm one of those 65K. I haven't played it in at least a year. It is not the game I Kickstarted at all. I have totally put this game off my radar. I'm sure I speak for most of those 65K.
I think you do.
I actually re-installed the game and...man it is still bloody awful. It just feels ancient, everything feels so slow and clunky, even completing the starting area was a struggle.
I am an Old School player and I find it really difficult to play and understand the game, I cannot even begin to imagine how a player new too this type of games must feel playing SotA.
HAHAHA omg they actually think that game is worth more then a 15$ a month sub that's priceless honestly from what I've seen the game barely rates a 5$ a month sub and an initial price tag.
Apparently, they think it's worth up to $50 a month in sub LOL. This was Chris last year on the the subscription topic.
"BTW, I think we've discussed a monthly pledge option publicly before. It would have multiple different levels, maybe $5,$10,$20,$50 a month pledge tiers. They would include a number COTOs at a good exchange rate, and a few fun items based on how many consecutive months you had pledged. COTO rewards per month could also increase over time as a reward for sticking with it. I know this isn't exactly what you want with a subscription BUT it would be really hard to force a completely new mandatory payment model onto the existing audience."
Trust me when these people say crazy out there loony stuff like this, you can bet they will do it. They're so out of touch with reality it's not even funny.
I'm sure they have been thinking on their sub option since the start of a way to milk people of more money. They should have focused on making a good game, instead they seem to have spent more time on how to get quick money fast from whales with high priced add on store junk, keeping their paychecks fat while doing the absolute minimum, and this laughable sub idea.
They should have called this game TORTURE, because that's what it is to try and play this game, ROFL.
Kickstarter reminds us that SotA was supported by 22k backers for nearly $2 million in development costs.
22k people. On what planet they thought 22k would multiply to 100k or 200k sustained subscription customers is beyond me.
Everything we know about MMO retention shows that almost 80% of players stop playing after the first month. It's not common for a game to grow, month on month for any prolonged period of time. It just isn't.
This means that 22k people would be 4.4k after the first month. They would have to attract 95k - 195k paying players to sustain their imaginary numbers. lol
And I know "this time it's different", but Ashes of Creation brought in $3.3million with 19.6k backers. Just saying. They're going to have to have a miraculous product in order to attract any real in-game population.
There has not, nor will there ever be, a game with 100% retention. There is drop-off and flux, and when your most ardent supporters are such a small group of people you're already ice skating uphill. You might make it, but you're going to have to skate like a freakin terminator.
There is no shortage of dream-worthy feature lists on Kickstarter, just remember that reality is a cruel mistress and she doesn't care how much you believe in Joe Schmoe running the project.
I wouldn't be surprised if they offered the game as all three. No matter what, you get access to the cash shop and all you need is F2P to get the basic game while a subscription gets you monthly rares (like a telethon, stretch goals being sub levels), and the buy to play would be the bundles that come with property deeds.
In today's Reddit AMA, Darkstarr answered a question about how to bring in new players and keep them.
Player:
Q: What are your plans for bringing in new players and to keep the new players around long term?
Darkstarr:
A: We
have been testing out our Free Trial system for the last few months and
in the next few months we will begin promoting this more and more as
the game improves to bring in new players. To keep players around long
term we will be working on more high end content around the end of the
year.
There it is folks... unless I'm reading that wrong, it sounds like they're planning on marketing the game as a free trial. It's not exactly F2P, but it's still free up until the player is faced with a paywall or quit. I'm not seeing a lot of retention coming from this.
65,000 backers and only 133 playing the game right now. Those figures do not compute. Something is off.
Actually, that ratio is probably standard for "early access" games, particularly of the MMO kind. A great many people buy , try and shelve it for "later" once they find that the "early" state of the game is not really compelling.
And in the case of MMO's, there's often a wipe or two during development, which also discourages frequent or prolonged play.
133 players on steam playing. Last I checked I still don't have to play the game through steam. So saying just 133 people are playing can be very misleading.
Why do you fans keep doing this? Why do you keep repeating statements you know are deceptive and have been disproven long ago?
We've been through this a hundred times with Chris Spears himself even on the Reddit; we know the percentage of Steam accounts that are linked, it's just over half of all accounts. We know that their own highest figure of 700 odd Peak matched on that day to the visible 400 Peak on Steam, showing that the percentages of Steam to Non Steam held consistent, and thus that if you had the Steam client, you launched through it too; we know then that the 133 players now mean the actual peak is only going to be around 200 total.
Oh, and the game will never be wiped again. It launched into Persistence in July 2016 and Portalarium have stated time and time again it's never going to be wiped now. They answered as such in today's AMA.
All of this is known.
WE KNOW THIS.
Why do you keep trying to deceive other people instead of just being honest and telling them the true state of the game?
In today's Reddit AMA, Darkstarr answered a question about how to bring in new players and keep them.
There it is folks... unless I'm reading that wrong, it sounds like they're planning on marketing the game as a free trial. It's not exactly F2P, but it's still free up until the player is faced with a paywall or quit. I'm not seeing a lot of retention coming from this.
I am more worried about the answer he gave on how they intend to keep players around: 'Add more End Game content'.
That confirms that those guys don't have a clue of what they are doing. The game is shit from the get go, that's what put people off. The starting zone is absolutely atrocious, probably the worst of any game I played.
If they want to keep the players they better redesign the UI and the Starting Zone, followed by a solid Story Line which introduce the player to the world of SotA by giving him an idea of what he is doing there and what he is supposed to do. For Gods sake use Lord British (the character, not Garriot) to build some kind of Lore around him, how difficult can it be. Give Britannia a soul, maybe people would star caring about exploring the world.
Every time I try the game I reach a point where I think: 'What's the point of playing this game? Why should I keep playing it?' I cannot find a single reason. The games is so disjointed, it feels like a bunch of features mashed together without any real thought. I am actually shocked by how poor its design is. Do Portalarium actually even play their game?
i was 300 $ in,thanks whatever the great power that helped me i managed to sell part of my share (250$ for 190$)! soooooooo i want my other 45$ back ! this game sux,but not even that-few years ago when i and most of the community screamed fix the combat,the devs were like,but everyone loves the combat,we wont touch it .And if someone is thinking like me back then- ill give SOTA a chance. Dont do it !
“If we have 65,000 backers now, if you just move that up to something as small as 100,000, and you look at a modest spending like in Ultima Online which was usually about $10 per month, that’s 12 million a year. If you bump that up to 200,000, that’s $24 million in revenues. Those kinds of numbers I think for many roleplaying games including ours are well within reach.”
65,000 backers... of which only 133 are playing the game right now.
Yea, "old person who isn't with the times" is seriously correct, else you'd think RG would know about the low rate of initial-player-base retention that's common knowledge by now.
I'd guess they might be setting a new record low for retention rates if those figures are remotely accurate.
Almost starting to make Wildstar look good by comparison.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
What happened in May to generate that increase in numbers?
That huge spike to over 500 players in 2016 was when the game soft launched into persistence. There hasn't been a wipe in almost a full year now and there won't ever be another one. The game is capless where skill progression is concerned for both combat and crafting and the economy is controlled by grinders. So, when persistence happened everyone was like "yeah boi!" and then it all fell off once people realized LAUNCH had happened and the game wasn't changing... then Portalarium officially sanctioned (and promoted) RMT gold farming and selling and then the community discovered almost the entire game was 3rd party Unity assets, then we found out there were private investors even though we'd always been told that players were their only source of funding, and then even the most dedicated fans started getting banned for asking less than flattering questions about what was going on with KS promises, development, PVP, combat, combat, microtransactions, combat, combat, combat, RMT, offline single player, combat, storyline, and combat... and now all that's left are a couple dozen whales that are still unwilling to accept reality because some of them have pledged as much as 50k-60k each betting on the RMT market.
Thanks. I was aware of the rest, just this soft launch I didn't know.
There are more than a few controversial forum topics that were locked by community management (though many have been deleted) and they date a lot of significant events that contributed to the spike and drop after final wipe. One of these days if I get a chance, I'll chart them out... wayback machine captured a lot of the heated discussions before devs and mods could sanitize them; like all the promises leading up to final wipe and then all the events that translate into negative player retention.
Thanks. I was aware of the rest, just this soft launch I didn't know.
There are more than a few controversial forum topics that were locked by community management (though many have been deleted) and they date a lot of significant events that contributed to the spike and drop after final wipe. One of these days if I get a chance, I'll chart them out... wayback machine captured a lot of the heated discussions before devs and mods could sanitize them; like all the promises leading up to final wipe and then all the events that translate into negative player retention.
A lot of posts were deleted, but never fear! InsaneMembrane over on Shroud Unlimited managed to capture some before they were removed. You can check them out there. http://shroudunlimited.boards.net/board/8/vault
What happened in May to generate that increase in numbers?
It wasn't May, you're looking at the July 2016 Land Rush and switch to Persistence.
That was people coming back, and quickly leaving again when they realised the game just wasn't any fun. This is why I say the fans are being deliberately dishonest, they KNOW the game has already had the prior accounts come back, but they'll use any deception to keep the game afloat just that little bit longer.
They should consider paying people for playing this game.
I wonder if the people who spent thousands of dollars on ingame assets are happy about it.
Yeah, at this point it becomes mandatory for SotA to change into F2P title to stay afloat. F2P are being considered by Garriot? That guy is surely full of himself...
When you don't want the truth, you will make up your own truth.
Comments
That said, considering how deeply entwined the cash shop is with a lot of F2P MMOs, I am quite positive that monetization has entered into the design phase rather early in most F2P MMOs' life. Not so much with B2P and Sub MMOs of course (of which the long term ramifications of B2P leads to some rather hilarious monetization issues down the line. Guild Wars 2 really seems directionless sometimes...)
Given the haphazard nature of it and Richard Garriot's statements that are hilariously out of touch with reality when it comes to the game's revenue hurdles in front of it, Shroud of the Avatar didn't consider monetization until late into development it seems, however. But of course, they didn't consider lots of things (or at least consider lots of things correctly).
Yes, please NO! His over-developed sense of self-importance gets in the way of the words so it's hard to read the articles.
~~ postlarval ~~
I actually re-installed the game and...man it is still bloody awful.
It just feels ancient, everything feels so slow and clunky, even completing the starting area was a struggle.
I am an Old School player and I find it really difficult to play and understand the game, I cannot even begin to imagine how a player new too this type of games must feel playing SotA.
"BTW, I think we've discussed a monthly pledge option publicly before. It would have multiple different levels, maybe $5,$10,$20,$50 a month pledge tiers. They would include a number COTOs at a good exchange rate, and a few fun items based on how many consecutive months you had pledged. COTO rewards per month could also increase over time as a reward for sticking with it. I know this isn't exactly what you want with a subscription BUT it would be really hard to force a completely new mandatory payment model onto the existing audience."
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/quick-brain-dump-on-our-logic-behind-cotos.71486/page-3#post-705035So it won't be mandatory but optional.
Trust me when these people say crazy out there loony stuff like this, you can bet they will do it. They're so out of touch with reality it's not even funny.
I'm sure they have been thinking on their sub option since the start of a way to milk people of more money. They should have focused on making a good game, instead they seem to have spent more time on how to get quick money fast from whales with high priced add on store junk, keeping their paychecks fat while doing the absolute minimum, and this laughable sub idea.
They should have called this game TORTURE, because that's what it is to try and play this game, ROFL.
22k people. On what planet they thought 22k would multiply to 100k or 200k sustained subscription customers is beyond me.
Everything we know about MMO retention shows that almost 80% of players stop playing after the first month. It's not common for a game to grow, month on month for any prolonged period of time. It just isn't.
This means that 22k people would be 4.4k after the first month. They would have to attract 95k - 195k paying players to sustain their imaginary numbers. lol
And I know "this time it's different", but Ashes of Creation brought in $3.3million with 19.6k backers. Just saying. They're going to have to have a miraculous product in order to attract any real in-game population.
There has not, nor will there ever be, a game with 100% retention. There is drop-off and flux, and when your most ardent supporters are such a small group of people you're already ice skating uphill. You might make it, but you're going to have to skate like a freakin terminator.
There is no shortage of dream-worthy feature lists on Kickstarter, just remember that reality is a cruel mistress and she doesn't care how much you believe in Joe Schmoe running the project.
/Cheers,
Lahnmir
Kyleran on yours sincerely
'But there are many. You can play them entirely solo, and even offline. Also, you are wrong by default.'
Ikcin in response to yours sincerely debating whether or not single-player offline MMOs exist...
'This does not apply just to ED but SC or any other game. What they will get is Rebirth/X4, likely prettier but equally underwhelming and pointless.
It is incredibly difficult to design some meaningfull leg content that would fit a space ship game - simply because it is not a leg game.
It is just huge resource waste....'
Gdemami absolutely not being an armchair developer
Player:
Q: What are your plans for bringing in new players and to keep the new players around long term?
Darkstarr:
A: We have been testing out our Free Trial system for the last few months and in the next few months we will begin promoting this more and more as the game improves to bring in new players. To keep players around long term we will be working on more high end content around the end of the year.
There it is folks... unless I'm reading that wrong, it sounds like they're planning on marketing the game as a free trial. It's not exactly F2P, but it's still free up until the player is faced with a paywall or quit. I'm not seeing a lot of retention coming from this.
Why do you fans keep doing this? Why do you keep repeating statements you know are deceptive and have been disproven long ago?
We've been through this a hundred times with Chris Spears himself even on the Reddit; we know the percentage of Steam accounts that are linked, it's just over half of all accounts. We know that their own highest figure of 700 odd Peak matched on that day to the visible 400 Peak on Steam, showing that the percentages of Steam to Non Steam held consistent, and thus that if you had the Steam client, you launched through it too; we know then that the 133 players now mean the actual peak is only going to be around 200 total.
Oh, and the game will never be wiped again. It launched into Persistence in July 2016 and Portalarium have stated time and time again it's never going to be wiped now. They answered as such in today's AMA.
All of this is known.
WE KNOW THIS.
Why do you keep trying to deceive other people instead of just being honest and telling them the true state of the game?
That confirms that those guys don't have a clue of what they are doing.
The game is shit from the get go, that's what put people off.
The starting zone is absolutely atrocious, probably the worst of any game I played.
If they want to keep the players they better redesign the UI and the Starting Zone, followed by a solid Story Line which introduce the player to the world of SotA by giving him an idea of what he is doing there and what he is supposed to do.
For Gods sake use Lord British (the character, not Garriot) to build some kind of Lore around him, how difficult can it be.
Give Britannia a soul, maybe people would star caring about exploring the world.
Every time I try the game I reach a point where I think: 'What's the point of playing this game? Why should I keep playing it?'
I cannot find a single reason.
The games is so disjointed, it feels like a bunch of features mashed together without any real thought.
I am actually shocked by how poor its design is.
Do Portalarium actually even play their game?
Almost starting to make Wildstar look good by comparison.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
That huge spike to over 500 players in 2016 was when the game soft launched into persistence. There hasn't been a wipe in almost a full year now and there won't ever be another one. The game is capless where skill progression is concerned for both combat and crafting and the economy is controlled by grinders. So, when persistence happened everyone was like "yeah boi!" and then it all fell off once people realized LAUNCH had happened and the game wasn't changing... then Portalarium officially sanctioned (and promoted) RMT gold farming and selling and then the community discovered almost the entire game was 3rd party Unity assets, then we found out there were private investors even though we'd always been told that players were their only source of funding, and then even the most dedicated fans started getting banned for asking less than flattering questions about what was going on with KS promises, development, PVP, combat, combat, microtransactions, combat, combat, combat, RMT, offline single player, combat, storyline, and combat... and now all that's left are a couple dozen whales that are still unwilling to accept reality because some of them have pledged as much as 50k-60k each betting on the RMT market.
~~ postlarval ~~
It wasn't May, you're looking at the July 2016 Land Rush and switch to Persistence.
That was people coming back, and quickly leaving again when they realised the game just wasn't any fun. This is why I say the fans are being deliberately dishonest, they KNOW the game has already had the prior accounts come back, but they'll use any deception to keep the game afloat just that little bit longer.
Yeah, at this point it becomes mandatory for SotA to change into F2P title to stay afloat. F2P are being considered by Garriot? That guy is surely full of himself...
When you don't want the truth, you will make up your own truth.